zookeeper wrote:I have a WIP of an alternate solution to the castles<->walls problems, which I think would work even with the stone walls (not quite as well as with cave walls, but adequately anyway). There's some layering glitches to work out, especially with stone walls, but I think this would be a better solution than new sets of corner tiles if it works out.

As you can see, it doesn't work perfectly well in all situations (especially stone walls and the aquatic castle keeps have problems) but it does cover the majority of them and I think provides enough possibilities for authors to easily get a good result (compared to the old, anyway!). I'm not yet sure which bits are possible to improve further.

P.S. Dwarvish castles are a special case, and I didn't touch them at all: they already have special castle<->wall connecting tiles which work great for cavewall but not so great for stone walls, but their normal tiles are cut differently than all the other castles meaning that what I just did for the other castles won't work for them.

That does look like it should work, most of the time at least. It's nice not to need special transition images, that was going to be a pain. For the aquatic castle glitch, maybe try adding X* to the filter in line 614 (if you haven't tried it already):

doofus-01 wrote:That does look like it should work, most of the time at least. It's nice not to need special transition images, that was going to be a pain. For the aquatic castle glitch, maybe try adding X* to the filter in line 614 (if you haven't tried it already):

The image path is a bit misleading, that macro can probably be improved.

Yeah that alone doesn't fix it, it just changes to a different problem (keep-to-water shows up instead of castle-to-ground). I haven't studied at all how those macros work so I don't know how and why exactly it happens.

Speaking of castles, whatever happened to those slightly more generic stone sewer-ish castles you made a while back? I really like those as a very all-purpose and simple design that is well suited to just about any faction, since it simultaneously looks like it might be ancient and with its towers and battlements worn down, or very recent but utilitarian.

This might be a bit late, but I want to mention that it may not be important for the aquatic castles to be animated - they are in effect an artificial lagoon, protected from the ocean waves beyond. That doesn't mean they can't be animated, but does provide a potential explanation if you choose not to animate them.

Celtic_Minstrel wrote:This might be a bit late, but I want to mention that it may not be important for the aquatic castles to be animated - they are in effect an artificial lagoon, protected from the ocean waves beyond. That doesn't mean they can't be animated, but does provide a potential explanation if you choose not to animate them.

For that to make any sense they would then have to be partially redrawn.

Celtic_Minstrel wrote:This might be a bit late, but I want to mention that it may not be important for the aquatic castles to be animated - they are in effect an artificial lagoon, protected from the ocean waves beyond. That doesn't mean they can't be animated, but does provide a potential explanation if you choose not to animate them.

For that to make any sense they would then have to be partially redrawn.

Hrmm.... I think Celtic_Minstrel is saying waves lapping at the (inner & outer?) faces of the walls are not needed. And Zookeeper is saying they are needed? I never planned on doing that, it looks like it will be a huge project for such a small detail. My "animation plans" were for the water & little decorations at the top of the walls. Probably best to get that cleared up before going any further...

Gyra_Solune wrote:Speaking of castles, whatever happened to those slightly more generic stone sewer-ish castles you made a while back? I really like those as a very all-purpose and simple design that is well suited to just about any faction, since it simultaneously looks like it might be ancient and with its towers and battlements worn down, or very recent but utilitarian.

There wasn't a lot of pull, but they aren't completely abandoned either. I might get back to them.

doofus-01 wrote:Hrmm.... I think Celtic_Minstrel is saying waves lapping at the (inner & outer?) faces of the walls are not needed. And Zookeeper is saying they are needed? I never planned on doing that, it looks like it will be a huge project for such a small detail. My "animation plans" were for the water & little decorations at the top of the walls. Probably best to get that cleared up before going any further...

I'm talking about the water at the top of the castle keep walls and towers. That's the only unanimated water that could be meant as far as I can tell.

Anyway, while I do think they should be animated, I think that warrants rethinking the file organization a bit. There's currently 44 images which would need to be animated, which would mean a huge pile of frames, even if the animation was really short like 3 or 4 frames (I think even 3 might be enough, if done well; the details are really small after all). So, I'd be interested to see if the keep-to-castle tiles could be avoided altogether somehow, because it looks like then the number of images would drop to 15.

EDIT: It should probably be done by reversing the keep-castle images and rules; that is, instead of connecting keeps to castles, they'd connect castles to keeps. That way they wouldn't need to include any parts of the keep tiles in them. I could handle the WML part if necessary.

EDIT2: Looks like I forgot about the gates, so the above alone won't do. Will have to think about it a bit more.

zookeeper wrote:I'm talking about the water at the top of the castle keep walls and towers. That's the only unanimated water that could be meant as far as I can tell.

OK, good. I don't think "lagoon" would have anything to do with the top of the walls, but sounds like it isn't an issue in any case.

zookeeper wrote:Anyway, while I do think they should be animated, I think that warrants rethinking the file organization a bit. There's currently 44 images which would need to be animated, which would mean a huge pile of frames, even if the animation was really short like 3 or 4 frames (I think even 3 might be enough, if done well; the details are really small after all). So, I'd be interested to see if the keep-to-castle tiles could be avoided altogether somehow, because it looks like then the number of images would drop to 15.

What sort of animation are we talking about here? I was thinking the fountains and swirls on the top of the towers, and some small sparkles or wiggles on the straight parts, which wouldn't involve anything special and there could be non-animated sections.